#Exhibit of the Month

The main parts of the camera include the body, bellows, lens, and viewfinder system. The body consists of two lacquered walnut wood frames, joined by a folding black textile bellows that allows the necessary extension for focusing. On the front panel is the Agfa anastigmat lens, mounted in a Compur-type shutter produced by F. Deckel in Munich. It features a foldable "brilliant" viewfinder for both portrait and landscape orientation. It uses glass photographic plates coated with a photographic emulsion, mounted in walnut wood holders, with a frame size of 9x12 cm.
The walnut wood model, considered the flagship "Agfa Isolar Luxus," was designed by the A.H. Rietzschel factory in Munich, acquired by AGFA in 1925, which continued producing this type of camera under its own name until the late 1920s.
The piece was restored by Mihail Culașco, Restoration Department of NMHM.
Brief History of the Camera
The history of the camera spans 200 years, evolving from the camera obscura to today's digital devices. Key milestones include: the first permanent photograph in 1826 by French physicist Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, using a wooden box and a plate coated with bitumen of Judea; the invention of the first photographic process - daguerreotype - in 1839 by Frenchman Louis Daguerre, marking the official birth of photography; the invention of calotype, based on the negative/positive principle, by British physicist and chemist Fox Talbot; the invention of wet collodion plates by Englishman Frederick Scott Archer and dry glass plates by Richard Leach Maddox and John Huds Bennet; the introduction of flexible roll film and the launch of the first Kodak camera by American inventor George Eastman; the release of the first 35 mm film camera by German company "Leica"; the launch of the first instant camera "Polaroid," invented by American Edwin Land. Finally, starting in 1975, this path led to the digital photography revolution. Each successive step made cameras smaller and faster, significantly improving image quality.
The first photographic studio in Chișinău was opened in 1854 by Eduard Glewski, and before World War I, there were already about 100 photography studios in Bessarabia.
The collection of the National Museum of History of Moldova includes over 30 cameras, made in Austria, Germany, France, USSR, Japan, and China, dating from the late 19th century to the 2000s. Among them are folding bellows cameras, BOX-type cameras, single-lens reflex (SLR) and twin-lens reflex (TLR) cameras, as well as digital (DSLR) cameras.

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Exhibitions

“TESTIMONIES FROM THE GULAG: MEMORY OF THE VICTIMS OF THE TOTALITARIAN COMMUNIST REGIME”

The Museum of History and Ethnography of Telenești

15 September – 15 October, 2022

The establishment of the Soviet occupation regime on the territories of the left bank of the Prut had dramatic consequences, which are still felt in the society of the Republic of Moldova. The repressive policies and violent Sovietization began with the adoption of three decisions, between August 26 and November 4, 1940, on the recruitment of 59,500 people, mostly from rural areas, as a workforce for the coal and metallurgical industries of the USSR.

On June 12-13, 1941, in the 6 Bessarabian counties, incorporated in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, 4,507 people were arrested and 13,885 ones were deported.

The second wave of deportations took place on July 5-6, 1949, based on a top-secret decision by the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party; during this wave 35,796 people, including 11,889 children, were deported to Siberia and Northern Kazakhstan.

On the night of March 31 to April 1, 1951, a third wave of deportations followed, this time on religious grounds. At that time, 2,617 people (including 842 children), the members of religious organizations considered illegal and anti-Soviet, were repressed.

The grain requisitioning policy, established by the decrees of the Council of People's Commissars of the Moldavian SSR and the Central Committee of the Communist Party (of Bolsheviks) of Moldavia of April 9, 1945, obliged peasants to hand over grain to the state according to imposed quotas; non-compliance with these decisions provided for the punishment of the peasants according to art. 58 and 58-1 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR. As a result of the Soviet state's cruel policy of requisition grain from peasants, there was the Famine phenomenon of 1946-1947. The number of people who starved to death between December 1946 and August 1947 ranged from 115,000 to 250,000, to which were added another 350,000 victims of malnutrition; At least 39 cases of cannibalism were recorded during the famine.

The photo-documentary exhibition "Testimonies from the Gulag: Memory of the victims of the totalitarian-communist regime" presents evidences of victims and survivors of political repressions and mass deportations from Moldavian SSR selected from the collections of the National Museum of History of Moldova and documents studied within the framework of the State program "Recovery and historical development of the memory of the victims of the totalitarian-communist regime in the Moldavian SSR in the periods 1940-1941, 1944-1953".

The exhibition is organised in the context of the European Heritage Days and is a tribute to the memory of the victims of the totalitarian-communist regime in the USSR.

The exhibition was developed within the Project "Memory culture for societies in the process of democratic transformation: promoting good practices between Lithuania and the Republic of Moldova", with the support of the Program for the Promotion of Democracy and Cooperation for Development of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Lithuania.